In April 2009, a 47-year-old church volunteer from a village in West Lothian, Scotland walked onto the stage of Britain’s Got Talent wearing a dress and hairdo that, as one reporter put it, might have been stylish when Dwight Eisenhower was president. The camera cut to Simon Cowell, who was sneering. It cut to the audience, who seemed close to grimacing. It then cut back to Susan Boyle who said she wanted to be a professional singer.
The crowd was tepid. Then she sang "I Dreamed a Dream." By the third note, Cowell couldn’t stop smiling. By the end, the audience was on its feet weeping. Piers Morgan told her it was "the biggest surprise I have had in three years on this show."
It wasn’t just Susan Boyle’s voice that left an impression, it’s the moment before that when she walked on to a room full of doubters while questioning her own judgment.
It may sound strange, in this era of lifestyle vloggers, influencers, and life coaches who seem to have it all figured out, to say that most of us are walking around with a verdict already issued against us, mostly by ourselves. Some version of: not good enough, not qualified enough, an impostor.
In 1978, two psychologists named Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes gave the feeling a name. They studied a group of women who, despite advanced degrees and professional accolades, "persist in believing that they are really not bright and have fooled anyone who thinks otherwise." They called it the impostor phenomenon. Forty-eight years and more than four thousand peer-reviewed studies later, the feeling subsists.
Maya Angelou felt it. “I have written eleven books, but each time I think, ‘Uh oh, they’re going to find out now. I’ve run a game on everybody, and they’re going to find me out.” Sheryl Sandberg confessed to it in Lean In. Tina Fey, said in an interview that the beauty of impostor syndrome is that you "vacillate between extreme egomania and a complete feeling of: I’m a fraud!"
Not sure if midlife makes it worse, or just amplifies the voice that we’re all impostors. I’ve written about impostor syndrome before, and here’s what I’ve come to believe: The fix is not to argue with the self-doubting voice. It is to train ourselves to speak to it more kindly.
Psychologist Kristin Neff has spent twenty years showing that self-compassion—treating ourselves the way we would treat a friend going through the same thing—produces better outcomes on almost every measure that matters: less anxiety, less depression, more resilience, more follow-through. She breaks it into three pieces. Self-kindness, instead of self-criticism. Common humanity, the reminder that we are not the only one in the soup. Mindfulness, the practice of noticing the feeling without drowning in it.
Ethan Kross, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, has shown that simply talking to ourselves in the third person—using our own names—reduces the brain’s emotional reactivity within the first second of a distressing thought. While it feels ridiculous, and conceited to talk to ourselves in the third person, brain imaging studies confirm it works.
What both of these methods are really doing is the same thing. They are demoting the inner voice from harsh critic to gentle coach. We are simply hoping to switch from the Cowell at the front of our heads, dripping condescension, to a friend who has actually heard us sing.
To be honest, I’d rather walk into the sea than wake each morning wonderstruck, asking myself, “What prodigious thing will I do today?” I’ll have to wait for a future birth — as culturally promised — to work up the courage for that level of self-regard.
But we can all try to remember Susan Boyle, standing in her white pumps in front of three thousand people who had already written her off, and singing anyway. The audience does not have to believe us. We do.
The road of life is paved with flat squirrels who could not decide on time. It’d be ideal to not become one of them.